Although sensor technology can help agriculture, its adoption is limited because farms often do not have power or Internet connectivity in the field. Microsoft Research is working towards an end-to-end approach, from sensors to the cloud, to solve the problem.
The goal is to enable data-driven farming. Data, coupled with the farmer’s knowledge and intuition about his or her farm, can help increase farm productivity, and also help reduce costs. As part of the FarmBeats project, Microsoft Research is building several unique solutions to solve these problems using low-cost sensors, drones, and vision and machine learning algorithms.